How would a Time War Work?

[watti3460]

Hi. I am not sure if this is the best place to post this, but I am a player of Timemaster since the 80's and I recently started playing around with it after at least 15 years absence. One thing I have always been uncomfortable with is the Time War. How would this work? What is the basic strategy here? The Demorians seem to want to alter history so we don't exist anymore, but their attempts seem rather nonspecific.

For example: After the time war begins, why not send time soldiers back to maybe 200,000 years ago to middle Africa where we evolved and set off one nuclear weapon in a valley and man would not have evolved. What is the sense of altering an event like the battle of Gettysburg and expecting it to alter history significantly? It seems sort of trail and error.

And if you did eliminate human evolution 200,000 years ago, would 1) T-0 disappear? Or 2) does it create a T-X where man does not exist and T-0 still exists untouched? And if man didn't exist the need to attack them in a time war would be unnecessary and the Demorians would not have actually a reason to stop human evolution. Therefore, they wouldn''t and humans must have evolved.

If 1) then there is no solution. We lose since there is no time corps to stop it since it does not exist.

The game seems to suggest that 2) occurs. If so, do you send a T-0 Time Team to T-X to fix this? If so then the role of the Time War seems to be stopping alternate realities from being split off from T-0. Then if you stop this, does T-X disappear since there is now no difference from T-0 now? If T-X does not disappear, why do we care that it exists at all. T-0 is still fine.

I guess my basic problem is I cannot envision a Time War at all. If you did not do something as basic and stop human evolution, then everything else seems like a nuisance more than a concerted attempt to annihilate humankind. If you kill Julius Caesar the chances are good that it will not matter in the future and eventually man would go to the stars without him and invent time travel.

[sniderman]

Interesting that you posted here as I actually saw your comment posted at Time Corps HQ asking the exact same thing. It was such an interesting query, I addressed it in a blog post titled "Why Didn't The Time War Didn't Destroy Humanity?" Go check it out. There may be an answer there that works for you.

[3llense'g]

My guess would be that all the most important events of human history are fortified by time agents, so they have to try and sneak through the cracks, altering smaller instances and snowballing major alterations from there.

[sniderman]

My guess would be that all the most important events of human history are fortified by time agents, so they have to try and sneak through the cracks, altering smaller instances and snowballing major alterations from there.

Yup, the truly important turning points of human history often have an elite "Event Guard" assigned who are voluntarily loop-trapped at that point. They relive the same event over and over, watching that it always occurs as history recorded it. (Event Guards are usually rotated out every few months to avoid chrono-psychosis.) If there's a major violation of this event, they immediately contact Time Corps for assistance.

[watti3460]

Thank you for the reply. I have recently gotten timetricks and I will be reading it asap. However, in the interim I was left to my own devices and I came up with a strange and admittedly non-canon take on the TimeMaster game world. You see even with your explanation, which is indeed excellent and most helpful, I have a hard time just hand waving the idea that the Demoreans just want to take over humanity and started a time war. I was a big fan of Michael Moorcock and I sort of came up with this.

Once upon a time there was a single universe and a single timeline. There was a big bang and a cosmic expansion and stars and worlds were formed, life began on many and civilizations arose on some. Eventually trillions of years later the universe cooled and began to contract. Stars winked out of existence and life began to become extinct regardless of its evolutionary progress.

However, there were two civilizations so advanced they tried to survive the collapse of the universe. One called the Keepers of Order for a lack of better term, embraced order or "negentropy" and the other chaos or "entropy". The Keepers evolve to such an extant they become highly ordered photons of energy which do not require a physical body and communicate solely through the formulas of physics. The chaos species evolve and also do not require a cohesive physical form and become amorphous matter capable of thought. Unfortunately, the chaotic ones embrace chaos so much they are unable to remain cohesive as they become pure chaos. It is too late for them to "go back" so the only way for them to survive this is to consume order. Thus they are know as the Eaters of Order.

Inevitably the two come into conflict and there is a war in this cold dying universe. As part of the war many of these creatures on both sides are destroyed. However, the Eaters develop the ability to shift in time and find that if they can alter past events they can increase entropy by releasing order to be consumed to sustain themselves. The Keepers follow them into these dimensions and attempt to destroy the Eaters. But not knowing the changes that have been made and not having physical form they cannot repair the damage. As the two races battle like this arbitrarily, they create many alternate universes. Eventually the Eaters determine that small changes create timelines, but the more ordered or established the universe they change the more order they can eat. However, the Eaters are limited by their small numbers and the fact that physically they are nothing more than amorphous blobs with little manipulative ability to make huge changes in history. Still, several universes have been reduced to churning unordered pure chaos by the Eaters as they consume order and expend it to remain cohesive and cognizant but they need more universes.

Eventually the Keepers sequester themselves in a dimension where order reigns and use their ability to interact directly with the laws of physics to battle the Eaters on multiple planes. The Keepers try to create a universe through subtle manipulations and their ability to see the future, in which a race evolves and the laws of physics are such, that that races creates time travel. To do this, they must reach back to just after the big bang where there is little order and introduce tiny amounts of order, to subtly change the timeline before it is well established. Ultimately, these are the humans in what we call T-0. In the process though, countless T like timelines are created as spin offs and failed experiments to this end.

This draws the attention of the Eaters who can sense this development of time travel. They realize this is a threat as the humans now have the ability to correct changes in their and other universes and rob the Eaters of entropy. Fortuitously, on one plane, the Eaters encountered the Demorians, ironically a highly ordered society but physically chaotic enough to be able to shapeshift, and bend them to do their bidding. They unleash the Demorians on the humans in T-0 in order to stop the creation of time travel. The Keepers still have powers and are able to influence T-0 through the manifesting of paranormal memory, and the slowing of temporal changes through the "time hates change" law which is directly related to the properties created by the the Keepers in the creation and maintaining of T-0, their best hopeto stop the Eaters.

So that's my back story. What do you think?

[sniderman]

I have a hard time just hand waving the idea that the Demoreans just want to take over humanity and started a time war. ?

Ah, but the Demoreans DIDN'T start the Time War! The Time War occured amongst humanity itself. Once humans discovered time travel, anyone with a machine could go back in time and start tinkering with history for their own means (ala the movie "Time Cop"). The Demoreans showed up as a RESULT of the Time War!

From the rulebook:
But, because of the intervening years of human expansion in the galaxy and the devastating wars which accompanied that expansion, it was not until 7051 that scientists had constructed crude devices that allowed one or two people to travel into the past. Each of the major galactic powers obtained these machines. Unfortunately, the governments began to see time travel as a weapon. With these new devices, they could attempt to "erase" important events in the past in order to destroy or dominate their neighbors. In 7054, the Time Wars broke out, beginning almost 100 years of chaos. Whole cultures were destroyed, and many of man's worlds were reduced to Stone Age technologies. Several alien allies suffered the same fate. Finally, all those involved realized that the wars were intolerable.

The Time Wars ended in 7154 with the signing of the Temporal Treaty. But the major powers soon realized that no treaty would prevent tampering from outsiders and mercenary travelers. Thus, in 7154, the major powers jointly established the Time Corps. They had created a "repair crew," an organization whose sole mission was to travel backward on the Parallel, restoring history to the way it "should" be.

And there we were. To avoid political tampering, the three powers gave us complete autonomy. We established a secret headquarters, to keep the mercenaries from wiping us out. Originally, we planned only to repair the timeline and disband. Of course, with the aliens and renegades in action, that became impossible.

The renegades are veterans from the Time Wars who pirate their way through history to enjoy a long and pleasant life. Most renegades seldom plan to cause changes, but they take no precautions against them. Their time-travel machines are crude and inaccurate compared to ours; consequently, they often cause problems by the very act of traveling. Not long ago, for instance, one of them popped into 50 B.C., and landed directly on Caesar himself. What a mess that was to fix....

The Demoreans, on the other hand, have every intent of changing history. These are aliens from another Parallel who caught wind of our Time Wars, and were drawn here like flies to sugar. They saw the power that time-travel created. Now, they seek to change our history enough to bend our Parallel toward theirs, toward a destiny of their own choosing. Presumably, they hope to control us, becoming rulers over all things in our universe. Our job, of course, is to stop them.

However, your take on the history of the Continuum is pretty nifty too!